She was deathly ill as a young adult with a rare form of vasculitis, a condition that causes inflammation throughout the body, affecting the heart, lungs and shutting down her kidneys. Although her family feared she wouldn’t make it, she made a full recovery after the transplant and now studies addictions at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology’s Vancouver campus. She plans to continue to university after that.

B.C. now has the highest rate of living organ donations, at 28 donors per million population.

In 2013, 127 kidney transplants came from living donors, compared to 83 the year before. There were 99 transplants from cadaverous donors.

Livers can also come from living donors, but only three such operations were performed in B.C. last year, compared to 54 cadaverous liver transplants.

Deceased donations are now at 14.5 donors per million population which is closer to the national average after years of being much lower, said Dr. Olwyn Johnston, a specialist in kidney transplant at Vancouver General Hospital. That’s because more people have registered as donors and B.C. Transplant is having more success finding donors and their families at the optimal time for conducting a transplant.

B.C. patients have also benefited from the national Living Donor Paired Exchange that takes pairs of donors and recipients willing to go through a transplant, but do not match due to factors such as blood type, and connect them with people who do match.

A total of 346 organ transplants were performed in B.C. last year, an increase of 40 from the year before. There are 876,000 people registered as organ donors in B.C. and almost 500 waiting for transplants.

That’s important because the demand for kidney transplants is growing with the aging population. About 40 per cent of transplants are now given to people over 60, she noted, as older people stay healthier and the medications used after transplant improve.

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Live kidney donations hit an all-time high in B.C.

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